What is Google PageRank?TõnuApr 17, 2010

We just started to show Edicy Pro users their sites' PageRank. But what is PageRank? Why and how did we come to see it as such an important issue that everyone needs to know it? Here's Google PageRank explained for you, in a simple and understandable way.

Why is it important for you?

Google PageRank is the most important underlying mechanism of Google search. Google gives pages with better PageRank a better placement in the search results. It means more traffic and more revenues. It's one of the most important mechanisms in SEO marketing.

PageRank is a numerical value assigned to each page on every website in the internet. The value is based on the importance of that certain page in comparison with all the other pages in the world.

How does it work?

It's achieved first of all by counting the number of pages that link to it. In the next step Google adds a myriad of other techniques to remove unimportant incoming links and spam from the results and evaluates the relevance and authority of the remaining links.

Google finalizes the analysis by boiling the magic down to a single number from 0 to 10. That's PageRank.

All ranks differ from each other by a magnitude. It means that 2 is ten times better rank than 1, while 3 has again ten times more value compared to 2. It also means that it's therefore incredibly hard to grow the improtance of your site from one PageRank to the next. Still, all internet marketing specialists keep PageRank building one of their top priorities. It just makes such a difference, as you can see from the visual explanation of the magnitude.

World's top sites have PageRank of 7 to 10. Good regional businesses reach up to 5-6 points. Edicy's PageRank is 7. Your first goal should be at least 4-5.

Replies to this post

Tonu i like the stretch goals you're setting out here: 4-5 for a blog is ambitious. Any info for your users on how your edicy.com pagerank filters through to their blog, if at all?

Tõnu Apr 19

Pierre, good to see you here :) 5 for a personal blog would be too ambitious goal, true. But for a great local business it's doable. Edicy pagerank works in favour of your blog only if you get to be featured in our blog (like the volunteers who help us translate) or if you are selected to the featured sites on Edicy, both of these subpages having pagerank of 6. But it's just a fraction of what the site has to achieve on its own.